Create
Talking Bacharach with rock icon Todd Rundgren
One of the few musical legends who actually told the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to stuff it (they inducted him anyway), Todd Rundgren has followed his muse, and his muse only, since erupting onto the scene as an impish wunderkind more than 50 years ago.
Rundgren is back in the bay area Tuesday, April 22, not as a quixotic singer/songwriter, not with his legendary power pop band Utopia, not covering Bowie or Beatles, or sharing the spotlight with his pal Daryl Hall (all of these tours have passed our way in recent years).
No, his Mahaffey Theater appearance is part of “What the World Needs Now – The Burt Bacharach Songbook in Concert,” which finds him as the best-known singer in a nine-piece orchestra assembled by pianist Rob Shirakbar, Bacharach’s longtime music director/conductor.
Bacharach, who died in 2023 at age of 94, wrote the music for the following songs, among many others. Drumroll please: “Baby It’s You,” “Walk on By,” “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “The Look of Love,” “What’s New, Pussycat?,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” “Make it Easy on Yourself,” “Wishin’ and Hopin,’” “Promises, Promises,” “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself.”
Let’s take a quick breath.
“(They Long to Be) Close to You,” “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” “Wives and Lovers,” “You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart),” “Always Something There to Remind Me,” “Trains and Boats and Planes,” “What the World Needs Now,” “Alfie,” “One Less Bell to Answer,” “This Guy’s in Love With You,” “Arthur’s Theme (The Best That You Can Do),” “That’s What Friends Are For,” “On My Own,” “God Give Me Strength.”
This is sophisticated pop music, stylish and savvy and probably imprinted somewhere on your heart.
Rundgren doesn’t sing every song in the show; Wendy Moten, a runner-up on The Voice, Season 21, has the supple cords to put across many of the Bacharach hits made famous by his longtime muse and friend, Dionne Warwick; reviewers have also been going gaga over vocalist Tori Holub – Variety insists she channels the late Karen Carpenter.
Although Tuesday’s Mahaffey concert is the next-to-last show on the tour, the Catalyst spoke with Rundgren in late March, just before the company hit the road. He was, at that point, still figuring out how it was all going to go.
St. Pete Catalyst: I can’t imagine that a lot of people associate you with Burt Bacharach. Why are you doing this?
Todd Rundgren: Well, the more general answer is, people don’t know what to associate me with. So there’s no reason why it would be any stranger, necessarily, than me doing a David Bowie tour … or something perhaps more unusual. I do recorded collaborations every once in a while, and I’ve done everything from Pink Floyd to King Crimson – I imagine that because they’re prog rock, there might be less head-scratching.
But I don’t have a particular bias for or against most music. You probably won’t catch me on a lot of country records! I often look forward to being able to do something that is a little less obvious. Not to show off, but to see if I can still expand my language a little bit.
Is there an element there of keeping yourself from getting bored, or complacent?
I wouldn’t say so in this particular instance, because I really didn’t want to do another tribute tour, but this is a collection of material, first of all, that is pretty remarkable by most standards. Considering the number of hits he’s had, but also the vast variety of artists who have covered them.
The other thing is, I was heavily influenced early on, even before I started writing music, when I was pretty much just an average listener and trying to understand how music worked, and realized at some point I might have to write [laughing] … one of the first maybe three records that I ever bought with my own money was that first Dionne Warwick record with “Walk on By” on it. And it was that particular song that attracted me.
It was not simply the song itself, and the interesting way it went from dark to light, minor to major and things like that, but because I had been raised in a more eclectic musical milieu than a lot of people. Because my dad didn’t like contemporary pop music, but he did like contemporary classics, from like Debussy onward. So I got exposed to a lot of that, and to a lot of show music, that sort of thing.
So I had more open ears to things that were orchestrated, and especially if there was a certain skill to the orchestration, y’know, these simply weren’t just piling strings onto something. It’s integral.
It’s because he took over so much of the process. It’s not just writing the songs, but arranging and conducting and producing as well. The only thing that he didn’t do was write the words.
I love the drama in some of those early records of Bacharach/David songs: “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself.” Did that appeal to you too?
I never got to meet Burt, or interact with him or learn about him in the way that Rob has. And I learned from him that Burt was, in a sense, a frustrated classical composer. He really wanted to do more traditional classical music, but of course there’s not a huge call for that, so he turned his talents to writing pop music.
And there’s a lot of music before “Walk on By,” before Dionne Warwick. When he took the reins of that Dionne Warwick album, and wrote all the songs and arranged and conducted and produced it. I wasn’t aware there was all this music before that, and it’s been my pleasure to re-visit a couple of them as well: “Any Day Now,” I’m doing that, and “Baby It’s You.” And I’m doing “Anyone Who Had a Heart.”
How did Rob convince you to do this tour?
At the time I agreed to do it, I thought I was just going to be one of the marquee names. There’ll be at least two or three other people in the same way that Celebrating David Bowie was Adrian Belew, and Angelo from Fishbone, other people who were more or less known quantities.
Or that White Album thing you were part of …
Yeah, doing the Beatles with Christopher Cross, Joey Molland and Denny Laine, all people that you would have known from some context or another.
As time went on, I discovered that I’m kind of shouldering a lot of the burden of this, not simply singing a songs, but whether I like it or not I’ve got to impose some sensibility of my own on this. Because of my high profile [laughing].
What made them think you’d be a good fit for these songs, though? “Todd Rundgren is a rock ‘n’ roll guy … let’s get him!” Kind of a disconnect for me.
Well, I had to do some of the more challenging stuff on the David Bowie, I had to do “Life on Mars” and “Space Oddity,” that sort of stuff. [laughing] And maybe that made them think I could cover this pretty well.
I do enjoy the R&B stuff when I go out with Daryl. Y’know, Daryl is obviously also something of an R&B fanatic, so especially the R&B aspect is appealing. It goes to other places as well.
Since I got so many of the heartbreakers to cover, I also laid claim to some of the more lighthearted stuff. Purposefully, not because I had the desire to sing them so much, but so I didn’t come off as a sad sack. “What’s New, Pussycat?” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” I do those.
You’re usually in charge. When it’s a Todd Rundgren tour, it’s your deal. This is Rob’s show, right? Are you just one of the singers? Is that weird for you?
Well, it’s weird except nobody knows who Rob is. They know who I am. And so, even though from a musical standpoint, he’s building this cathedral of music to Burt Bacharach, I’m gonna be the name that gets bandied about if we don’t manage to pull this off [laughing].
Anything else?
Well, something that sometimes seems to get glossed over when we talk about this show. We’re also tribute-ing the lyricists of these songs, which is most of the time Hal David. The lyrics can make or break a brilliant melody. They can make the song sound silly, not matter how much craft goes into the musical part of it.
Somehow, it worked. That’s why that particular marriage went to for so long. Which is why a song like “God Give Me Strength” doesn’t work as well for me. It’s the idea of a Burt Bacharach song, but it’s at a level of sentimentality that Hal David never got to.
OK, I thought of one more question. Your own tours are so varied – different bands, different genres, sometimes performing one of your entire albums live. Have you ever thought of just going out and doing a greatest hits show? You don’t do that – why?
First of all, I don’t have enough of them! [laughing] A greatest hits show that’s over in 20 minutes, y’know?
I’ve built up a fan base over more or less a musical lifetime, based on those things that you already know: That I don’t repeat myself, that I sometimes do something that’s unexpected or challenging for the audience. And most of my audience has been with me a very long time.
But fortunately, there is an audience for that. And it turns out that I’ve been fortunate to be able to reconstitute that audience with new audience.
We get a lot of young people coming to my shows. And part of it is because they’ve been listening since they were in the womb! [laughing] Their parents were big fans, and so they’ve been exposed to it and they’re, if nothing else, used to it.
But there’s also a generation of young people who do take music seriously. Y’know, they get something out of it. It’s not simply a lifestyle accoutrement. And they’re not simply following the micro-talent of the month.
Publicity photo.
